is talking money, Cassie is gathering gossip. When the doctors discuss hearts and the lawyers discuss writs, Cassie wants to know all about who, what, when, where, why, and how. Cassie majored in mass communications, but found her courses too technical, not satisfying her curiosity. She's figured out that what really grabs her is anthropology—comparative cultures—a field in which academic jobs scarcely exist. So she's considering graduate school in history.
Anne, Beth, and Cassie all need impeccable advice from Ms. Mentor, who will allow her sage readers to eavesdrop.
A Ph.D., Ms. Mentor declares, should be pursued only by those who love what they are doing. They should burn with curiosity and wonder; they should delight in discovering new things. Otherwise the graduate school apprenticeship is too long, and the required studies often dreary. Graduate students have little power and much stress: as fellowships and assistantships dry up, poverty becomes a way of life. And at the end, given the dismal job market in virtually all fields, most Ph.D.s will not follow in their professors' footsteps, even if they want to.
Still, Anne has the burning drive; Cassie has family money to fall back on. But Beth must be able to stay at one university for years of study. Then she'll need to move, possibly several times, to remote and distant places where jobs happen to open. Even with good child care and a husband willing to share a commuter marriage, her options are limited. It's not uncommon, now, for a new English Ph.D. to take five years to find a tenure-track job.
This is not to say that Beth cannot be an academic. But Ms. Mentor would place her bet first on Anne, with her passion for her subject, her real-world experience, and her willingness to sacrifice. Cassie, though, may find history to her liking—if she discovers mentors who share her passion for gossip and narrative. But Beth, so far, knows only about reading literature for pleasure, and Ms. Mentor fears for her.
Will Beth be able to embrace the jargon of literary theory—or will it make her mewl and twitch?
For Anne, Beth, Cassie, and all their fellow students, graduate school will be a series of rituals, some dating back to German education a century and a half ago. (There are those who think Ms. Mentor was present at the creation, but she denies it.)
All graduate students today, in lockstep or death grip, enroll in required seminars and classes—some exciting, some deadly. If they're in science, they'll do labs and fieldwork. If they're in applied practical fields, they may do internships or clerkships or residencies. They may need to be proficient with certain languages or computer programs or machines. They may be sent to ask strangers eccentric or peculiar questions, which their sociology or statistics bosses will then manipulate, via numerical hocus-pocus, into conclusions about human behavior.
Graduate students may also be coaxed into doing other very odd things for their major professors. A group of food science graduate students at a Big Ten university were once seduced into swallowing huge quantities of hot sauce so that their professor could photograph, with fiber optic equipment, the effects on their stomach linings. (The students who suffered the most were those who took aspirin.)
Similarly, some science graduate students at Johns Hopkins University were once enlisted to help protect their major professor's prized gardens from rabbit incursions. Following his directions, the students hied themselves to the Baltimore Zoo, where they beseeched the zoo keepers to give them tiger dung. Then they hauled it out to their professor's estate, where they spent the rest of the day slathering it about his carrots and marigolds.
They did get Big Macs for lunch.
More mundanely, though, students are required to take oral and written exams, sometimes several in different subject areas. Then, finally, they're turned loose to write theses or dissertations—the stage at which the uncommitted are most likely to drop out, and disappear.
If, as sometimes happens, graduate students
• cannot bring themselves to do one more reading assignment—or
• cannot get out of bed to go to the library—or
• get nauseous at the smell of a lab or the thought of a rat—or
• spend hours, days, or weeks in useless housekeeping chores, such as folding sheets or curtains, while avoiding all academic work—or
• fuss and dither for months, never finding a dissertation topic that really grabs them…
Those are all danger signals. Academia may not be for them, and dropping out can be the smartest thing to do. It is never a sign of failure.
For at every stage, Ms. Mentor proclaims, graduate students should be asking themselves: “Am I leading up to what I want to do?” and “What are my goals for this week, this month, this year?” and “Do I want to do this for the rest of my life?”
If Anne finds something new about Michelangelo; and Beth discovers a forgotten novelist whose work anticipates Edith Wharton's; and Cassie forges ahead with an historical study of several kinky anthropologists' lives—then they will have the intellectual excitement that will keep them learning and growing, getting their doctorates and making genuinely new contributions to the world of knowledge.
Then it will all be worthwhile, and Ms. Mentor hopes their parents will live to see the great day. She herself will cheer and sing and perhaps even flick her tambourine.
But not all of Ms. Mentor's correspondents reach that pleasant pinnacle, as sage readers will now discover.
Up Against the Balls
Q: One of my most outspoken professors (I'm in political science) told me that “most of the guys who go to grad school these days don't have the balls to go into the real world.” Assuming that “guys” means all of us (he usually includes women), is he right?
A: Ms. Mentor has always been intrigued by the idea that one needs “balls” in order to do anything other than the work for which they were intended—i.e., the propagation of our species and the recreational pleasures of the bearer thereof.
She recalls Mary Ellmann's clever dissection, in Thinking About Women, and Kate Millett's, in Sexual Politics, of Norman Mailer's claim that a writer can do without anything “except the remnant of his balls.” Besides wondering, as feminist critics have a habit of doing, where one would place a pen—or, these days, a computer—in a testicular vicinity, Ms. Mentor…well, she thinks it all quite silly.
Still, your query, like all those Ms. Mentor selects, deserves a thoughtful reply. If your professor's claim is to be taken literally—that most of the people in grad school lack balls—that is certainly true in the humanities, where well over half of incoming graduate students are women. In political science, however, nearly 75 percent of graduate students receiving Ph.D.s are men. Ms. Mentor thinks it unlikely that they are all eunuchs.
Ms. Mentor therefore understands your professor to be saying, in a crudely symbolic way, that guys “with balls,” those who enroll in the “real world” rather than in graduate school, have the qualities attributed to true masculinity—such as courage, intelligence, and resourcefulness.
Ms. Mentor thinks it fortunate and delightful that all women, whether they are in graduate school or not, have those qualities.
Plotting One's Courses
Q: My department's director of graduate studies, when he advises students about classes to take, has an unfortunate habit of placing course lists in his lap—so that the advisee has to look at his crotch. I am interested
